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add basic tutorial about self signed certificates
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asafc committed Sep 13, 2023
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title: Use Self Signed Certificates
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# How to use self-signed certificates?

### Why?

- If you want to use https in your local dev setup and you don't want to generate public certificates with Let'sEncrypt or something similar.
- **NEVER use self-signed certificates in production unless you absolutely know what you are doing!**

### How it works

Entities you should be aware of:

- **private CA** - a private certificate authority that can generate TLS certificates. Since this is not a publicly recognized CA, its certificates will not be respected by (almost) anyone - but you can teach OPAL to respect that CA's certificates.
- **localserver** - a local program running with https:// signed with a certificate that was generated by the "private" CA.
- **opal-client** - can be directed to fetch data from localserver, can be told to respect the private CA's certificates

### How to generate self-signed certificates

1. Generate a private key for the "private" CA

```
openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca-private-key.key 2048
```

2. Generate a public key / certificate for the "private" CA

```
openssl req -x509 -new -nodes -key ca-private-key.key -sha256 -days 365 -out ca-public.crt
```

3. Generate a private key for the "localserver" service

```
openssl genrsa -out localserver-private.key 2048
```

4. Generate a certificate request signed by the "localserver" private key.
NOTE: you must specify the FQDN to be the host of the (self-signed) https service, e.g: `localhost`

```
openssl req -new -key localserver-private.key -out localserver-request.csr
```

5. Your "private" CA self-signs on the certificate request and generates a valid self-signed certificate

```
openssl x509 -req -in localserver-request.csr -CA ca-public.crt -CAkey ca-private-key.key -CAcreateserial -out localserver-cert.crt -days 365 -sha256
```

### configuring a uvicorn service to use the private certificate as the HTTPs certificate

```
uvicorn myservice.main:app --reload --port=8000 --ssl-keyfile=localserver-private.key --ssl-certfile=localserver-cert.crt
```

### Configuring a data entry (via `OPAL_DATA_CONFIG_SOURCES`) to redirect to the self-signed https service

Run OPAL server with:

```
OPAL_DATA_CONFIG_SOURCES='{"external_source_url":"https://localhost:8000/opal/data/config"}'
```

### Teaching the opal-client to respect the self signed certificate

Run OPAL client with:

```
OPAL_CLIENT_SELF_SIGNED_CERTIFICATES_ALLOWED=true
OPAL_CLIENT_SSL_CONTEXT_TRUSTED_CA_FILE=/path/to/ca-public.crt
```

If you run OPAL client with docker - don't forget to mount /path/to/ca-public.crt on a docker volume.

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